Thought Leadership

What is SPO?

November 6, 2018

By Jon Cooke, VP of Global Agency Sales

What is SPO?

So, Supply Path Optimization – or SPO – refers to the practice of deliberately choosing a specific SSP or exchange by which buyers will procure their media. It’s important to buyers because there are a number of criterion you can evaluate SSP partners on today: particularly transparency and cost of the data, the fees that you pay, the quality of the inventory, and whether or not that supply partner meet standards around ads.txt compliance, GDPR compliance, and the like.

Why is SPO important to buyers?

The reason why buyers are evaluating Supply Path Optimization is because there’s got to be some more accountability in our industry. With all the different choices that buyers have, it’s important to conduct some sort of audit, evaluate your supply path partners on those criteria and others. You want to ensure that in today’s day and age where you may be paying in first price environments, that, number one, you’re not overpaying, number two, you want to ensure that you’re buying inventory that’s potentially ads.txt compliant or GDPR compliant with its users and publishers, and also you want to ensure that you’re paying for quality, brand safe, fraudulent free traffic.

So these are many of the reasons that exist to consider evaluating your supply path partners, and then optimizing – deliberately choosing – specific partners based on those evaluations.

My name is Jon Cooke, I’m the Vice President of Global Agency Sales at Rubicon Project in New York, New York.